Wednesday, 8 May 2024 — The Electronic Intifada
1900 Palestine time / 1900 Amman time / 1600 GMT / 1700 UK / 1800 CET / 11 am CT / 12 pm ET / 9 am PT
Short-lived scenes of celebration after Hamas announced that it had accepted a truce proposal on Monday gave way to renewed fear and confusion in Gaza, as Israel rejected the negotiated deal that had been signed off on by the United States, Egypt and Qatar.
Israel immediately ordered the evacuations of areas in eastern Rafah, the last relatively intact city in the besieged enclave and home to more than a million people already displaced from other parts of Gaza.
Hours later, Israeli forces began an armored advance and overnight on Monday seized the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing with Egypt. That assault cut off access for aid and any hope of exit for wounded Palestinians via Gaza’s only border with the outside world.
As Israel moved to escalate its assault on Rafah, human rights groups called on third states to intervene urgently to stop a massacre on the scale of Srebrenica – the 1995 genocide of thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys perpetrated in what had been designated by the UN as a “safe zone.”
On Tuesday, patients and medical workers fled Rafah’s al-Najjar hospital after Israel ordered the evacuation of the area, shutting down the only facility left in Gaza with a functioning dialysis unit to treat kidney patients.
We will be joined on today’s livestream by Dr. Adel Eksharkawy, a Canadian physician based in Calgary, Alberta.
Dr. Elsharkawy will tell us about his experience working at Gaza’s only functioning neonatal unit, at the Emirati maternity hospital in Rafah.
A specialist in the care of newborns, he recently returned from two weeks in Gaza as part of a delegation organized by Glia, a medical aid organization that provides care and medical equipment for vulnerable and conflict-torn populations all over the world.
Meanwhile, unbowed by the harsh crackdowns and attempts at repression, students across the United States and around the world are continuing to protest against the American- and European-backed genocide and their institutions’ role in it.
We will be joined by Shahd al-Hadid, a student at the University of Sheffield in the UK. She is a member of the Sheffield Campus Coalition for Palestine, which is leading a mass encampment in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Sabiya Ahamed, a staff attorney at the civil rights organization Palestine Legal, will also tell us about efforts to defend students against the widespread violations of their rights.
As usual, we will have a full round-up of news from Nora Barrows-Friedman and Jon Elmer will break down the resistance operation targeting the Israeli military build-up around Rafah and the steady attacks along the so-called Netzarim corridor dividing Gaza.
Join Nora, Jon, Ali Abunimah, Asa Winstanley and Tamara Nassar for all this and more.
We’ll be live on YouTube at this link.
1900 Palestine time / 1900 Amman time / 1600 GMT / 1700 UK / 1800 CET / 11 am CT / 12 pm ET / 9 am PT
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